MailChimp Selective Integration

Would it be possible to look at integrating ONLY the emailaddresses of patients which answer given search criteria, into MailChimp? At the moment, as far as I’m aware, when
integrating with MailChimp, all email addresses on record are transferred. The fee for using MailChimp is then
calculated on the total number of email addresses transferred to the MailChimp
account. By allowing selective
integration, Practices would have more control over their marketing budget by targeting
selected patient groups, whilst eliminating those patient groups we do not wish
to stretch our budget to reach with MailChimp campaigns. All thoughts or suggestions welcome, thanks.

Mailchimp is free for less than 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month. Our policy at the moment is to upload all un-archived patients in the database with an email address as a MailChimp subscriber. However, your email campaigns don’t need to be to all subscribers. Most relevant reports in Front Desk have a MailChimp function, which allows you to set filters to create a Mailchimp ‘Segment’ for a campaign, which is a subset of the subscriber list.

Our problem is that if we don’t upload all active clients with email addresses, you may create segments (subgroups) of clients using Front Desk reports that are not subscribers.

Hi Steven, yes we have more than 2000 clients with email addresses but if we could select clients using specific criteria BEFORE integrating to MailChimp we would be able to reduce the number to below the 2000 mark. If we could then filter from that customised subscriber list for targeted email campaigns that would be fabulous.

We found the same problem. We have well over 2000 email addresses on our system, but would probably only need to email half of those. Some clients don't want to receive newsletters, and if we could send them invoices or reports using Outlook (or similar) while using MailChimp purely for "advertising" it would be helpful.

Can we manually add/remove clients from MailChimp one at a time, while keeping the email address active for other purposes in Smartsoft?

It would be great if we can use the "set filters" for a Mailchimp campaign to only add those subset of the subscribers. The only other idea I can think of would be to add email addresses for clients with specific criteria - for instance, only add clients that have been to the practice in the last year, or of a specific age

It’s important that your subscriber list stays constant and that you don’t delete and recreate it, specifically that you don’t delete and recreate it for each campaign. The reason for this is that you will lose the details of patients that have chosen to opt out or unsubscribe to your emails. Further, Front Desk also has a two-way sync with MailChimp where it keeps details like email addresses up to date if they’re changed or when new clients are added in Front Desk. This cannot be easily done for an ad-hoc set of subscribers.

Our feeling is that most of our users will want to email almost all active patients with an email address at some point in time. For example, why would you not send a newsletter out to as many patients as you can? It must be noted that you can have multiple campaigns running, each to a subset of the total subscriber list using the segment functionality in MailChimp when creating Front Desk reports that filter your patient list. If you have over 2,000 subscribers, the charges by MailChimp for their services offer fair value.

As an alternative, if you do want to create a cut-down subscriber list, you can export data out of Front Desk, including email addresses, upload it to MailChimp and manually maintain the subscriber list moving forward.

We have been manually manage our client list (upload to mailchimp regularly) in mailchimp. We are very close to 2000 subscribers.

At this point we would like to use the FD Mailchimp intergration function. I know Smartsoft prefer we create a new list in Mailchimp for the intergration. Since our list in Mailchimp is all from our FD database, can we use the existing list in Mailchimp for the intergration? Will (and how) the process of the intergration check the patients already in our list in Mailchimp?

The contacts you have uploaded to Mailchimp, external to Front Desk, do not have any links back to the Front Desk system. This means your existing Mailchimp list will not work with the Front Desk integration.

You will need to create a new empty list in Mailchimp, then follow the process of uploading your patients from Front Desk to use the integration. This will allow you to take advantage of the segment features and create Mailchimp campaigns based on reports from Front Desk.

Hi Andrew,What if I create a new list for FD integration in mailchimp then merge it with my existing list in mailchimp. Will the new merged list lose the links back to FD system?
I only need one list in mailchimp because the existing one in mailchimp are all from my FD database.

It's probably not a good idea to try to merge your existing list with a new list from Front Desk, as it may result in duplicate contacts and cause issues with syncing. The integration has not been designed to be used this way, so the result is unknown to us.

It is probably best you start a new list for use with Front Desk alone.

Hi Timothy, thanks that's helped to explain some of the difficulties. I think our next step will be to look at archiving some of our inactive patients which should hopefully reduce our numbers. Thanks for your reply.